FLAGSHIP 4 – SOCIAL PROTECTION FOR AGRICULTURE AND RESILIENCE: APRIL – JUNE 2017 UPDATES

• Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme (PSNP), which combines a public works program with unconditional cash and food transfers, is one of the largest safety net programs for household food security in Africa. Despite multiple benefits that this program brings to the Ethiopian poor, this recent paper from IFPRI’s Ethiopia Strategy Support Program (ESSP) finds no evidence that the PSNP reduces chronic undernutrition in preschool-aged children. Read more in this blog.
• Akhter Ahmed, IFPRI’s Country Representative for Bangladesh, gave the following presentations on social protection in April-June 2017:

“Linking Nutrition to Agriculture and Social Protection to Improve Food and Nutrition Security: Evidence from IFPRI Research in Bangladesh” (Keynote presentation at “Connecting Pathways: Linking Multi-sectoral Approaches to Food & Nutrition Security” workshop in Dhaka, June 5, 2017)

“Data, Policy, and Practice: Using Evidence to Guide Nutrition-Sensitive Investments in Bangladesh” (presented at the Office of the Delegation of the European Union to Bangladesh, Dhaka, May 24, 2017)

“Food Security in Bangladesh: What Role for Social Safety Nets?” (presented at the USAID Mission in Bangladesh, Dhaka, May 4, 2017)

• Harold Alderman made a presentation in a workshop on school feeding in Mexico City titled “Estrategias para acelerar la contribución de los Programas de Alimentación Escolar a los resultados nutricionales: Evidencias y Oportunidades” (“Strategies to accelerate the contribution of School Feeding Programs to nutritional outcomes: Evidence and Opportunities”), at Seminario de Alimentación Escolar, Ciudad de Mexico, on April 24-26, 2017.
• Berber Kramer, Cluster 4.2 leader, spoke about insurance and big data at the conference “Scaling up agricultural adaptation through insurance: Bringing together insurance, big data and agricultural innovation” in Bonn on May 14, and participated the next day in a workshop “Tackling the challenges to scaling up agricultural index insurance”.
  To mark World Milk Day, Berber wrote a blog describing PIM-supported project studying how Kenyan dairy farmers use their milk income to manage risk. The first paper cited in this blog (coauthored with Xin Geng from IFPRI and Wendy Janssens from the VU University Amsterdam) was presented at Wageningen University 8th Development Economics Workshop on May 12, at the Northeast Agricultural and Resource Economics Association (NAREA) Conference in Arlington on June 13, and at the North American Econometric Society Summer Meeting in St. Louis on June 17.
• Kalle Hirvonen presented the paper The role of transaction costs in 'cash versus food' debate: Evidence from the Ethiopian Productive Safety Net Program (co-authored with John Hoddinott) at the Nordic Conference in Development Economics on June 12.

Selected publications

Ashour, Maha; Billings, Lucy; Gilligan, Daniel O.; Hoel, Jessica B.; and Karachiwalla, Naureen. 2017. Do beliefs about agricultural inputs counterfeiting correspond with actual rates of counterfeiting? Evidence from Uganda. Presented at CSAE Conference 2017: Economic Development in Africa. St Catherine's College, Oxford, March 19-21, 2017. https://editorialexpress.com/cgi-bin/conference/download.cgi?db_name=CSAE2017&paper_id=185

Geng, Xin; Janssens, Wendy; and Kramer, Berber. 2017. Liquid milk: Cash constraints and day-to-day intertemporal choice in financial diaries. Presented at CSAE Conference 2017: Economic Development in Africa. St Catherine's College, Oxford, March 19-21, 2017. https://editorialexpress.com/cgi-bin/conference/download.cgi?db_name=CSAE2017&paper_id=1145

Hoddinott, John F. and Mekasha, Tseday J. 2017. Social protection, household size and its determinants: Evidence from Ethiopia. ESSP Working Paper 107. Washington, D.C. and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Ethiopia Development Research Institute (EDRI).   (also related to the work of Flagship 2 under Ethiopia Strategy Support Program (ESSP))

Kramer, Berber and Kunst, David. Intertemporal choice and income regularity: Non-fungibility in a lab-in-the-field experiment. IFPRI Discussion Paper 1646. Washington, D.C. https://ebrary.ifpri.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15738coll2/id/131229

Munro, Laura. 2017. Insurance structure, risk sharing, and investment decisions: An empirical investigation of the implications of individual and group weather index insurance. IFPRI Discussion Paper 1642. Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy Research Institue (IFPRI). https://ebrary.ifpri.org/cdm/ref/collection/p15738coll2/id/131185

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